


Shadow Shows

by scioscribe



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Pre-Slash, Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-19
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2019-06-29 16:19:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15733029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: “Ona values magic-users.  I’m sure I can work out some bargain with them to resupply us.”“Assuming they like your shadow-shows,” Thor says.  “Here a Loki, there a Loki.  Your magic doesn’t run to civic good, brother, you can’t purify their wells or heal their sick.”“No, but I don’t think I’ll have to resort to—”Entertainment, he almost says, and it’s half-true.  “Illusions.  Assume it’s something very complicated and technical.”





	Shadow Shows

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to Snickfic for the beta read and thanks to the original readers of the first bit, who made me want to expand upon it.

Their resources, post-Hela, are nil.  In desperate flight, Asgard’s citizens left their homes with their children’s artwork, their old love letters, their cameos of their grandmothers.  It’s all very touching until you need to feed the remains of a realm and your currency is all earmarked for the fuel to take you from port to port.  There are places, Valkyrie says, where you can unload personal crap, sorry, items of sentimental value, for cold hard cash, but they aren’t nice places, they would make the skin creep right off your bones.  Quite a comedown from a pampered life on Asgard—being told by your king that you have to surrender your earnest youthful _no, I love YOU more_ letters for the greater good.

“I don’t think we have to resort to that _quite_ yet,” Loki says.  He taps the display panel, bringing up a particular world.  “Ona values magic-users.  I’m sure I can work out some bargain with them to resupply us.”

“Assuming they like your shadow-shows,” Thor says.  “Here a Loki, there a Loki.  Your magic doesn’t run to civic good, brother, you can’t purify their wells or heal their sick.”

“No, but I don’t think I’ll have to resort to—”   _Entertainment_ , he almost says, and it’s half-true.  “Illusions.  Assume it’s something very complicated and technical.”

Thor, who trusts him lately, smiles at this and Loki’s stomach clenches.   _Fit for Sakaar_ , he thinks.  He doesn’t want Thor’s assessment of him to get that bleak ever again—or, well, not _bleak_ , exactly, but _trivial_.  He would rather be hated than held in contempt, so what does it say that he’s putting himself in the way of incurring exactly what he least wants?

It’s fine.  Thor doesn’t have to know.  It doesn’t have to be an issue.

“Don’t steal anything,” Thor says, because his trust only goes so far, as it should; Loki’s actually flattered by this.  “We can’t afford to develop that kind of reputation.”  A moment later he adds, “Also, it’s wrong.”

“Also,” Loki agrees.  “I’m pleased to see you thinking in practicalities first and foremost.”

Thor asks if Loki wants an escort on his mission to secure them trade, and Loki persuades him it’s unnecessary: he’s more than able to defend himself, after all, and the people of Ona are touchy.

Never let it be said that he won’t fit a bit of wordplay into it all.

The bargain he strikes is for credits, plain and simple; it’s less inherently innocuous in its looks than a bit of barter would have been, but beggars, even beggar-princes, can’t be choosers, and he has no wish to complicate his life by having to take out a supply manifest and talk over what he would or wouldn’t be willing to do for another wheel of cheese.  The reluctance, of course, is all on his side; Ona’s people don’t view this as sex at all.  Sex is simply the way they take Loki’s power into their own bodies.

It’ll replenish itself in time.  He’s spending nothing that he won’t get back.  He did more sordid things on Sakaar and then only for the sake of his own social climbing; this is comparatively clean.  Not that it’s easy to remember that when one person leaves and yet another one enters.  Like bees buzzing around a flower, supping at pollen.  They’re not excessively rough.  None of them attempt to make it good for him, whatever that would mean in this case, but they’re all polite and some of them even congratulate him on how impressive it is that he’s not yet used up.

There is no deception in this particular business.  When Loki is done, he’s done, and they all know it.  There’s nothing left to scrape out of him, not for right now, so he settles up then and there.

They have showers on the premises, thankfully.  He cleans himself up.  He starts to glamor some color back into his face, but of course he can’t; of course he is, as they charmingly said, used up.  He’ll just have to look pale, then.

The trade is fair.  The proceeds will feed them all for weeks, maybe even months.  Thor is happy, everyone is happy.

He can’t fool himself that sooner or later Thor won’t think to ask what exactly Loki bargained with.  Thor isn’t stupid.  Once he’s over the relief of not having a ship full of his people half-starved, he’ll start to wonder.  But maybe he’ll believe a lie.  _I thought the world of you_.

He doesn’t know why he didn’t think to anticipate Heimdall.  But there’s a knock at Loki’s door and as soon as he opens it and sees Heimdall’s face, he knows there’s no point in pretense here.  It isn’t scorn in Heimdall’s eyes, and he’s thankful for that.  It isn’t quite pity, either, more like concern.  But it isn’t gratitude, either, and really, some gratitude would have been nice.

Once the door has closed behind him, Heimdall says, “Are you all right?”

“Dehydrated.”  He shrugs.  “Sore.  I’ll mend.  I hope you didn’t _watch_.”

“No more than was necessary to make sure you would come home to us.”

Well, that’s certainly vague enough.  For all he knows, that means Heimdall’s attention never left him.

“Don’t do that again,” Heimdall says.  He doesn’t follow it with anything about telling Thor; it’s as if he expects Loki to listen to him on his own merits.

“I’ll do what has to be done for Asgard,” Loki says, maybe a little more because it has a nice ring to it than because it’s actually true.

“Asgard needs its prince.”

“And I’m not dead, as you can see.”  Also, Asgard never needed its prince _before_ , or at least not the younger one.  They need their dramatic rescuer, though, and it’s a role he likes playing.  They, at least, like his shadow-shows.  He doesn’t know why Heimdall doesn’t, except moral superiority and the fact that shadows mean nothing to Heimdall’s gaze, which burns them all away.  Loki has rarely liked him, he doesn’t like not having a place to hide.

“Not dead,” Heimdall concedes, “but shaking.”

This is probably a bluff, because when Loki looks down at his hands, they’re perfectly still.  But he looked.  Dammit.

“I’m tired,” he says.  Though he’s not going to sleep.  He can’t even remember the last time he slept naturally, without a little magic to ease him along.  His mind resists peace.

“Go to bed, then,” Heimdall says, and his voice is so intriguingly impassive, bland as boiled custard.  He doesn’t move.  Loki knows an offer when he sees one—except, apparently, he doesn’t, because all Heimdall does is graze his hand across Loki’s forehead.  A sudden, incredible sleepiness takes hold of him, a calm thicker than any he’s ever made for himself.  He has to struggle even to keep his eyes open.

He says, “So you watch my bed often then, I take it.  Not just on Ona.”

“It would take no special sight to know you have trouble sleeping.”

“That’s not a no,” Loki says.  He stumbles toward his bed, almost drunkenly, and winces as he lies down.

The last thing he knows before he falls into deep and blissfully dreamless sleep is the slight roughness of Heimdall’s callused thumb against his lower lip.  And that too is not a no.

*

Loki keeps plotting their course and Heimdall, damn him, keeps changing it.

“If this is foreplay,” Thor says, watching as Loki aggressively jabs the keys to reprogram their route yet again, “I’d beg the two of you to leave the rest of us out of it.”

“It’s not foreplay.”  There, now they are yet again bound to follow Loki’s particular will.  He ignores Thor’s unspoken questions about what has been in the air between him and Heimdall and what, for that matter, is making the question of their exact course to Earth so phenomenally tense.

But now that Thor is king, he seems to think he has a responsibility to pursue every problem until he takes it down by the throat like a wolf on a deer, so the questions remain less unspoken than Loki had hoped.  “What’s at the bottom of all this, brother?”

“Heimdall,” and Loki enunciates his name precisely, “thinks that seeing better than anyone else means that he knows better than anyone else.  I disagree.  Heimdall thinks that he has some responsibility to ensure I don’t… deplete my magic when I go to make the bargains that refuel us.  Heimdall—”

“—is usually more sensible than you,” Thor says.  There’s no trace of a smile on him now.  Loki has gone too far; said too much.  “So I’m curious now what risk he thinks there is.”

“Ask him.”

“I’m asking you.”

“It’s really nothing,” Loki says.  This isn’t technically a lie and in any case, he thinks sourly, it’s not like Thor can really expect him to be honest.  He’s never claimed _that_ total of a reformation.  “On Ona, I allowed their practitioners to drain away my reserves of power.  They replenish themselves naturally, so there’s no real loss at all.  It’s a little exhausting, maybe, but it’s a simple procedure.”

“Then why does Heimdall not want you doing it?”

“Who knows?  Maybe he’s gone senile in his old age.”

“Not unless you helped him to it,” Thor says sharply.

Loki deserves that, but it only widens his smile.  “I did not.  But if he keeps up this interference, I might reconsider.”

“Do not go to war with Heimdall, brother.  I need you both.”

Loki clears his throat, though he has nothing to say.  He lands upon, “Tell Heimdall not to go to war with _me_.”

“I don’t tell Heimdall anything.  He knows what he’s doing.”

“Excellent ruling, brother.  Truly, your command of Asgard is unquestioned and unquestionable.”

“I delegate,” Thor says.  “You know what that is, Loki, you must have handed off state business to someone while you slaved over your latest play.”

“I’m not sure I like how sarcastic you’ve grown in recent years,” Loki says.  “Repartee was always my job, not yours.  Consider delegating _that_.”

But in truth he thinks he still has better command of words than Thor—good enough, anyway, to put Thor off the scent for a little while longer.  He lied and Thor believed him.  Just like old times.  He doesn’t let himself think about what will happen if he makes another such deal and Thor catches on and declines to be fooled.  He doesn’t ask himself why he’s doing this again when the consequences could be so disastrous.  Why he’s flirting with Heimdall outright telling Thor what he’s up to.  It isn’t as though Heimdall wouldn’t have cause to sabotage him.

Except there was that moment, that lingering touch.  Which he thinks on more often than he would like.

So he seeks Heimdall out after his talk with Thor.

“Stop changing our ports of call,” Loki says.

Heimdall, damn him, shrugs.  “Stop making them worlds where you can strike that particular bargain and I will.”

“This is not a negotiation!”  He realizes he’s a moment away from shouting that he can do what he likes, and the embarrassment of that makes him hold his tongue and lower his voice.  “You know our need.  What I choose to do to aid us is not your business, except that it might be nice if you could manage to be thankful for it.  You were happy enough to see me on the bridge, do you not call that a risk to my life?  Far more of one than—being bedded.”

“What you did on Asgard was necessary,” Heimdall says.  “And your reasons then were better.”

“We are on the brink of extinction.”

“I shouldn’t even bother saying this to you, given your statues and your plays, but you’re being too dramatic.”

He doesn’t mean to laugh, but he does, and Heimdall smiles at him for what Loki thinks might actually be the first time.

“I think,” Heimdall says quietly, “that you feel yourself degraded by what you did on Ona.  I don’t think it was that feeling that made you choose to do it, but I think it’s that feeling you’re chasing now when you decide, without trying anything else, that that is how we must pay our way.  I might not stop your acts of ill-considered heroism, but I have no intention of standing by and watching you sink again into bitterness and self-hate.  I dislike it.  I wouldn’t see you treat a horse or a sword that way, let alone yourself.  And I swore an oath to the throne—I don’t think it involves standing by while you exhaust yourself, risk your health, and hurt your pride.”

Loki half-smiles and focuses on the last of this, because the rest of it is too much for him.  “You don’t think my pride could stand a hurt or two?”

Heimdall ignores this; acts as if Loki is only talking to himself.  “And all of that aside, Thor would be in a fury if he knew the nature of your plans.”

“Oh, well, you could say that about any of my plans, ever.”  But he swallows.  “I know he would be disappointed.  Ashamed.  I have no intention of him finding out how he comes by our restocked shelves, if that’s your concern.”

“I gave you half-a-dozen concerns.  And I spoke of your brother’s rage, not his disappointment.  I don’t call that the same thing.  Nor should you.”  He looks at Loki, and to be looked at by Heimdall is often disconcerting, but now it is particularly so.  “Even at your worst, Thor was not ashamed of you.  And where you are now is far from your worst.”

He cannot respond to this either.  “Thor, by the way, wants to know if we’re flirting.  If this is all some elaborate form of foreplay.”

Heimdall has a husky laugh that Loki likes more than is good for him.  “If it were, I hate to think it would be so unsuccessful.”

“Do you?”

This is a different look.  Warmer gold in those eyes now.  “I prefer to think that if I strove to bed you, you would be well and truly bedded, Loki Odinson.”

Some part of him wants to destroy this.  Except, troublingly, he does not know that he can make Heimdall despise him; surely if he could, Heimdall would already.  It is irritating to think that Heimdall, utterly without Loki’s permission, has decided to have Thor’s own equanimity towards him, to fight him when he needs to be fought and then to move on from it.

He did not ask for Heimdall to so very arbitrarily _like_ him.  Yet it seems Heimdall does.

“Well,” Loki says, “I’m glad to hear you’re not over-exerting yourself on my account.”  He rolls his shoulders back.  He tries to make it look like he’s thinking carefully.  “I will let you redirect our course once more.  If you are so insistent.”

*

That agreement holds them until Yarroway, where everything goes wrong at once.  Loki’s brief stint in the transfer house on Ona netted them more funds than any subsequent, more reputable trade, and by Yarroway, they are running on reduced rations and, worse, reduced medical supplies.  They have one overworked healer and Banner, who works exclusively with drugs and gauze and scalpels, all of which deplete with uncanny quickness.  And then the hyperdrive begins to malfunction.  Only little bursts of fuzz, as the Valkyrie puts it, in the navigational system, which most of the time is no problem at all, until suddenly you find yourself off by just the degree or two necessary to jump your fleeing civilization right into a black hole.

“Earth,” Banner says, “would call this situation a clusterfuck.  You’ll know that if we ever get to Earth which, at this rate, we won’t.”

Thor sighs.  “Thank you for your unfailing good cheer.”  When he is tired, and these days he is tired more often than not, he rubs fixedly at his empty eye socket, pressing his knuckles against the patch, and he does so now.  “I don’t know.  Maybe it’s time to think about selling the ship and buying a smaller one.  We’ll be crammed in even tighter, but the it’ll be less costly to fuel, and—”

“How much would close the gap?” Loki says.

Heimdall meets his eyes across the table but then presses his lips together; admits what they both know.  They are out of options.  “Fifteen million would get the repairs and the medical supplies.”

“Another five would bring us back to full rations for two or three months,” Banner says, tapping at his data-pad.

“But fifteen million would be enough,” Heimdall says.  He does not quite offer Banner a glare, but it’s close enough that Banner, who is, after all, most intelligent for a mortal, does not go on adding to their total.

Thor looks at Loki.  “You think to sell your magic again?”

“That’s what you did?” the Valkyrie said sharply.  “On Ona?”  So she has some idea what that entails, then.  Loki can tell by the look in her eyes.  “Bad idea.  Much as I hate to admit it, we might need your gifts.”

“Much as _I_ hate to admit it, you don’t.  You need Heimdall’s, so we don’t steer ourselves straight into danger, but right now I’m a current with no regular outlet.  I have tremendous power—”

“Possibly overstating it,” Thor says.

“—and if we aren’t using it one way, we might as well use it another.  And thank you, brother.  Your opinion means the world to me.”  Loki tells the truth best when he pretends to lie.  “I say it’s our best available strategy.”

“I don’t ask it of you,” Thor says.  “You were wan for days after Ona.  I think it takes more of you than you pretend.  But I don’t say we aren’t desperate.”

“Then it’s done,” Loki says.  “Make landfall on Yarroway and I’ll see what I can do.”

The Valkyrie corners him in the hall even before Heimdall can; drags him into a room that Loki isn’t even sure is her own.  She folds her arms.  “Why do I get the feeling Thor doesn’t know how magic gets bought and sold?”

“You’re astute enough to see that he never cared enough for seidr-craft to learn its ins-and-outs?”

“Give me one good reason I shouldn’t tell him the specifics.”

“Because you heard him as well as I did,” Loki snaps.  “We are desperate.  I haven’t been making a habit of it.”  Only because of Heimdall’s interference, but there’s no need to get into all that now.  “He needs me to do this, and there is no reason for him to know the details of it.  Why should he?  He’d only feel sordid about it all.  He would either grandstand and try to forbid me, which would result sooner or later in hunger and death, or he would realize we have no choice and go around despising himself and not being able to bear to look me in the eyes.  Only Heimdall and I are powerful enough to make a worthy trade, and as I already _said_ , we need Heimdall’s sight more than we need my tricks.  Besides, for fuck’s sake, you saw me on Sakaar.  It’s not exactly beneath my dignity.  The magic-trade is more honest than anything that happened there.  More lucrative, too.”

“And you of all people are so passionate about honest work,” the Valkyrie says.

She has him there.  “It’s work,” he says bluntly.  “A task that is unpleasant to me, yes, but one that will not bring law or war down on our heads, and one that will pay our way to safety.”

She evaluates this answer and finally nods.  “I’ll come with you, then.  See you get in and out all right.”

“I’d prefer you didn’t.”  Though he is, despite himself, strangely touched by the offer—if you can call something so presumptuous an offer.  “I won’t be at my best.”

“Norns, you have a _best_?  That’s news to me.”

He says, “I appreciate it,” and something of sincerity must show in his voice, because the Valkyrie doesn’t press any further.

She just says, “If you need us, we’re there.”

This point is implicitly proven by him stepping outside her room and almost immediately running into Heimdall, who of course has been waiting for him.  Loki doesn’t want to run this particular gamut of concerned disapproval.

But that is not, as it turns out, what Heimdall wants from him.

“You wanted gratitude,” Heimdall says.  “Do you still?”

The truthful answer to this is always yes, which he is sure Heimdall knows.  But he is not compelled to tell the truth, so he’s not sure why he tells so much of it: “Ceaselessly.”

Heimdall’s lips curve just a little, and he lifts Loki’s hand from his side and raises it to his mouth.  The press of his lips against Loki’s knuckles is warm and firm; the brush of his beard a slight and not unpleasant scratch.  He says, “For what you do for Asgard, I thank you,” against Loki’s skin, so close that the words have their own vibration.  If this is some long game to prove that he was right, that he could have Loki in his bed for the asking, well, he just might win.  Loki’s whole body feels warmer, a candle that’s been lit.  It’s not the worst way to go to the Yarroway houses, unless it winds up making him under-charge.

“My reasons are less spurious than you think,” Loki says.  “I am just… relieved to have a solution.”

“I know.”  Heimdall lets go of his hand.  “You feel the weight of the crown.”

Now he really is concerned about Heimdall’s state of mind.  “I don’t wear the crown.”

“No.  You feel the weight of it on Thor.”

He thinks of the new furrow in Thor’s brow, the new creases around his eyes; Thor weighing the pros and cons of stacking his people up on top of each other like fingers in a fist, Thor trying to see how many ways a single credit will split.  Gravity becomes him.  Worry does not.  “I’ve taken enough light from his eyes.  I would put some back if I could, in these days when he needs it most.”

“I watched your eyes for years.”

“Less interesting than some other sights, I’m sure.”

“The light that shone from you changed so often, I was seldom sure of its source.  Envy.  Ambition.  Obsession.  Then madness and bitterness, which was no light at all, which made you look as though you were nothing more than a painting come to life.  And now—”  He puts his palm gently against Loki’s cheek.  “Something new.  Whatever it is, Loki, it suits you.”

Loki closes his eyes.  “Perhaps I don’t like to be studied so closely.”

“Then I will not find you on your return, if you do not wish it.”

“I don’t think I said that.”  He feels the rumble of the ship’s engines still as they set down.  Landfall.  He straightens his collar, as though these are really the circumstances in which he needs to look his best, and says, “You can watch if you like.  For whatever reason.  I won’t ask questions.”  He understands this as the only gift he can give Heimdall: permission to look, with no strings attached, with no demand for honor or tact or care.  Loki would find it exhausting, to have Heimdall’s powers and use them so kindly.  He wants to say, _Get off on it if you wish, I’ll even like it, I’ll like thinking of your eyes on me_ , but the words feel naked.  It’s only partly true, anyway.  He’s sure there are other times coming when he will hate the thought of Heimdall seeing.  He doesn’t know what he wants, really, but he’s more or less used to that by now.

Heimdall only says what he said before: “I’ll watch to make sure you come home to us.”

So that’s good, he supposes.  They’ll both have plausible deniability.  And it’s possible Heimdall even means it—possible that that, more than anything else, is what Heimdall wants from him.

“I’ll come home,” Loki says.  He forces a smile.  “Play your cards right and I’ll even stay.”

*

It is Thor who picks him from the transfer house, and as with Heimdall, as with the Valkyrie, Loki can see at once that somehow Thor now understands.  But that is all he can see and he suddenly has the disconcerting thought that he does not, after all, know Thor better than Thor knows him.  It’s an epiphany he could have had on the floor of the Grandmaster’s docking bay, but he seems to come to these understandings late.

“Twenty-two million,” Loki says.  “Before you say anything.”

Thor shakes his head.  “You know I would never have let you do this.”

“When have you ever been able to stop me from doing anything?”

“Often.  I’ve been able to stop you often.”

Actually, that’s true.  He didn’t destroy Jotunheim.  He didn’t conquer Earth and hand over the Tesseract.  He didn’t sell Thor out to the Grandmaster.  What a deflating train of thought.

He shrugs, which is as good an answer as any and possibly better than repeating the amount he earned.

“This is not what I need you for,” Thor says.

“It’s what you needed me for today.  Don’t get hung up on sentimentality and _technicality_ , brother; what I did was exactly what I told you I would do, and you knew from the start I wouldn’t be off having a pleasant day, sipping wine and making sweet conversation.  Substitute in whatever act you find more in line with your sensibilities and let’s be off.”

“I find it in line with my sensibilities for you to not lie to me.”

“That seems overly ambitious.”

“Your happiness is a resource to me as much as your magic,” Thor says.  “And one I would guard even more closely.”  He embraces Loki and Loki, though bruised and sore, does not try to move away from him.  Thor’s fingers push through Loki’s still-damp hair.  Thor says, “You smell like lavender.”

“They have excellent clean-up facilities.”

“Clearly.”

Thor says again, very softly this time, “This is not why I need you,” and this time Loki hears it for the confession that it is, that Thor again sees their paths running along together, again sees them fighting side by side together forever.

*

The Valkyrie gives him a bottle of wine and makes, her eyes on the wall behind him, a lengthy explanation of how to rub the soreness from one’s muscles after a hard fight.  Loki listens, not because he’s going to actually going to do any of it—it sounds like a great deal of work, really, and as she said, he’s not enamored of work—but for a reason he doesn’t entirely understand.  Because she is bothering to tell him at all instead of just giving him the wine and pissing off.

And Heimdall does find him.

“Tell me you didn’t tell Thor,” Loki says, letting him in.

“I did not.  He proved more capable than you expected of entering a search query.”

“I miss the days of him not having the slightest trace of curiosity about where I went or how I spent my time.”  Though he doesn’t, really.  “Do you want a glass of wine?”

Heimdall waves the offer away.  “I’d not displease our Valkyrie by availing myself of her gift.”

“Even when I offer it?  Though it does seem strangely contentious here, what I’m allowed to offer and what I am not.”

In another man, that would be a snort.  “I wouldn’t say ‘allowed.’”

“Thor did.”  More or less.

“He’s a king, the word comes naturally to him.”

“Then what would you say?”  He drinks the wine, which is a better vintage than he thought the ship possessed; he makes a note to court the Valkyrie’s liking more often.

“That you tend to extremes, either of selfishness or of sacrifice, and that those who love you might wish to discourage that.  Even if they cannot always afford to.  But you’ve had a long day, and seeing the motives of others has never been your strong suit, and all of that applies less pointedly to a bottle of wine.”

“You’re intolerable,” Loki says, though there is in fact something oddly comforting about Heimdall telling him his latest failings: it is at least familiar.

“I think you tolerate me well, all things considered.”  Heimdall takes his hand again; skims his thumb over Loki’s knuckles.  He smiles, and he has an unfairly compelling smile.  “It’s not many who have your need for attention.  And I can, after all, always provide you with an audience. Provided of course that Asgard is not in imminent danger—and at the moment, we are not.  Would you like help sleeping?”

“If you can stand to wait for me to finish this first,” Loki says, taking another sip.

“I can,” Heimdall says.  He hesitates.  “If your offer still holds, I think I would like a drink after all.”

Warmth spreads through him, down to his fingertips; he tries to tell himself it’s just the wine, but he isn’t convinced.  This is something he wants to give.  He pours generously, the wine shining in the glass like a jewel, close to the amber of Heimdall’s eyes.  He suddenly thinks he might sleep well after all.


End file.
